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It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

theregister.com

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Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#111

Post by greentea23 »

JohnFen wrote: post #47
bri3d wrote: post #15

I dug into the technical details here over the last few days and as usual it's not quite as sinister as the hand wringing: * Automotive head units are just embedded computers. Most run Linux, QNX, or Windows CE, with some proprietary UI system on top. * These machines usually store data in an onboard database in flash (sometimes just SQLite). * Sometimes, phone data is captured using standard Bluetooth mechanisms (Me…

My personal solution: I won't own a car that has this sort of capability in the first place, and when I rent a car, I will never allow it and my phone to talk to each other for any reason.

Is that possible anymore? I think all new cars are always online and always collecting data now, and you void your warranty (very different cost/benefit calculus than voiding a phone warranty) if you tamper with the antennas to keep it offline. Very sad state of affairs.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#112

Post by progman32 »

someotherperson wrote: post #58
mattw2121 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big opportunity for one of the big car rental agencies to come out looking great by advertising their "privacy focus". They could advertise to customers that they promise/certify that any personal data is wiped between rentals. Sort of like all the cleanliness guarantees that came about right after Covid hit.

They'll just monetize it behind a $19.99 fee. And then they still won't do it, leading to some data leak, for which they'll be fined $2,000,000 despite having profited about $30,000,000 from it.

...and then lock the admin UI behind a password so you can't do it yourself :)

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#113

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

neuralRiot wrote: post #109
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EXACTLY. This "infotainment" BS harks back to vastly overpriced stock car radios of years gone by. All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want... except of course now the audio outputs have been removed. We should simply have a well in the dashboard with replaceable inserts that snap in to accommodate different-sized phone models, whi…

> All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want... That might be your personal prefernece, I particularly abhor the phone-centric world not to mention that a 5 inch “big-ass” touch screen becomes tiny when driving and that its UI is meant to be operated sitting down paying 100% attention to it not while operating a machine at 60mph down…

I can respect that. To some extent, though, that's down to the phone UI. iOS, ummm, 6 if I remember correctly was supposed to be more "car-friendly." Of course, that was another Jony Ive failure... it actually changed the system font to a spindly outline that was hard enough to see in normal conditions, let alone in a car. There was absolutely nothing in that OS that offered a "car-friendlier" experience. I was so glad to see that pompous hack leave Apple.

If you look at CarPlay, it chunks the functionality down to a few big icons on the screen at a time. No reason that can't be done on the phone itself in a "car mode."

Anyway, this is what I ended up doing: https://imgur.com/gallery/krRXQwP

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#114

Post by greentea23 »

luhn wrote: post #33
thorncorona wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

using AA/CP won’t prevent your car from being exploited.

It means my infotainment system is a dumb screen, so no opportunity for irresponsible development practices to leave an unsecured text message database lying around. I'm not going to go as far as to say it can't be exploited, but that is a significantly smaller risk surface.

Except that to run those in the first place you need to be running non-private spyware on your phone (iOS or vendor issued android ROM), so you give up all ability to maintain privacy in or out of the car.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#115

Post by simbolit »

hilbert42 wrote: post #106
simbolit wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I am out of town, I sometimes print at copy shops. You'd be amazed what kind of PDFs are left open in Acrobat, just because people are too lazy to close the application. I have seen contracts, bank account statements, residency permits, letters of incorporation, private messages logs, .... All without doing any digging, I just get assigned a computer for printing, turn on the screen, and it's there.

"You'd be amazed what kind of PDFs are left open in Acrobat," Observation tells us it's a lost cause to teach people about privacy/security of this type and have the large majority of people observe prudent ways of preventing their data from leaking. We've known about this since before the internet when people would chuck old documents in the garbage under the assumption no one would ever bother to go through their t…

> they're so small in numbers ... will be successful

worse, because it's so few people, this is suspicious behavior (in the eye of LEO)

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#116

Post by quantified »

gav wrote: post #59
bri3d wrote: post #15

I dug into the technical details here over the last few days and as usual it's not quite as sinister as the hand wringing: * Automotive head units are just embedded computers. Most run Linux, QNX, or Windows CE, with some proprietary UI system on top. * These machines usually store data in an onboard database in flash (sometimes just SQLite). * Sometimes, phone data is captured using standard Bluetooth mechanisms (Me…

> * If you use a rental car, Factory Reset the head unit when you leave. If I rent a car, I won't pair my phone at all, even going so far as to use a car charger instead of the provided USB ports.

Same. I imagine the risk of malicious USB ports is higher around military and aerospace rental hubs, like Colorado Springs and Huntsville, Alabama.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#117

Post by keep_reading »

SenAnder wrote: post #2

> In other words, it's A-OK for your car to "automatically and without authorization , instantaneously intercept, record, download, store, and [be] capable of transmitting" text messages and call logs since the privacy violation is potential, but the injury not necessarily actual. So it's effectively legal to sell backdoored hardware and software to spy on people. I wonder what would happen if I sold backdoored phone…

I have never seen a car do this without asking you if you want to sync contacts, calendar, and messages upon connecting to Bluetooth. iPhones also let you control this per Bluetooth connection.

Where is this being done without authorization?

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#118

Post by amelius »

RandallBrown wrote: post #94
akira2501 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This data is cached on the head unit so that finding a contact to call or reading a text message doesn't require 10 minutes worth of Bluetooth nonsense. This is such an early 2000s idea. I'd much rather my car act as a dumb display that shows a copy of my phone screen then an intelligent agent that tries to replicate functionality already extant in my phone.

I spent some time around 2012 working on in car "infotainment" units at a large tech company for a large car company. I was told that the infotainment systems were where a large chunk of their profit came from and differentiating their experience was important to the car company. Of course, they wanted to use decade old CPUs and touchscreens to save money, so the experience was horrible. I left shortly after CarPlay…

Once you bought the car they now have a monopoly on the software that is available. There should be laws against this type of monopoly.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#119

Post by MarioMan »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #90
akira2501 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This data is cached on the head unit so that finding a contact to call or reading a text message doesn't require 10 minutes worth of Bluetooth nonsense. This is such an early 2000s idea. I'd much rather my car act as a dumb display that shows a copy of my phone screen then an intelligent agent that tries to replicate functionality already extant in my phone.

EXACTLY. This "infotainment" BS harks back to vastly overpriced stock car radios of years gone by. All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want... except of course now the audio outputs have been removed. We should simply have a well in the dashboard with replaceable inserts that snap in to accommodate different-sized phone models, whi…

>We should simply have a well in the dashboard with replaceable inserts that snap in to accommodate different-sized phone models, which would connect to the audio system and power. But no... we still have phones bouncing around in the cabin or attached to hokey third-party claws, and janky-ass Bluetooth which (how many years in now?) can't handle simple music playback reliably.

I've been using Brodit/ProClip USA mounts to solve this. They sell holders designed specifically for your model of phone which attaches to a custom-fit mount for your car's make and model. It's pricy, at about $75 for a holder-mount combo, when cheap Amazon alternatives are closer to $10, but it overcomes a lot of the problems you list. I use it regularly for navigation, since my car doesn't support CarPlay or Android Auto.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#120

Post by froh »

DANmode wrote: post #79
bri3d wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easiest way to do this is usually to unplug the antenna and replace it with an RF terminator. The vehicle will simply think it is always out of range of cellular service. Unfortunately most modern vehicles require a lot of finagling to disable the telematics control module itself without causing error messages. It would be nice if some regulator would mandate an "easy-off" function for vehicle telematics - some k…

Unfortunately, the regulators (NHTSA) are inches away from mandating cellular be added to cars (if they haven't already pulled that lever).

they haven't yet, but the technology is there and is mandatory in large parts of the world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall

https://www.atic-ts.com/vehicle-accident-emergency-call-glob...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1

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